Steele reported his findings at the annual convention of the American
Psychological Association on Saturday, Aug. 12, in New York City. The meeting
also featured a task force report on what is known about genetic links to
intelligence, and three other sessions devoted to the controversy over The
Bell Curve. In that 1994 book, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued
that at least some part of group differences on IQ tests is inherited,
reflecting some innate intellectual inferiority of African Americans.

In a symposium about several research projects at Stanford, the University
of Michigan and the State University of New York, Steele detailed experiments
on factors that can depress the academic performance of women and African
Americans in college environments. His seven-year research project bears on
three currently controversial issues:

How to interpret racial differences in test performance.

The way selective universities and others interpret standardized test
scores in implementing affirmative action policies in admissions; and

The degree to which racial differences in college performance can be
eliminated by appropriately designed schooling.

In laboratory testing at Stanford and in a field program at the University
of Michigan, Steele found that a dynamic that he calls "stereotype
vulnerability" may be responsible for depressed performance. He also found
that the performance gaps between men and women in mathematics, and between
whites and African Americans as expressed in test scores, grades, and dropout
rates, can be eliminated with appropriately designed affirmative action
programs.

"These findings demonstrate another process that may be contributing to
racial and gender differences in standardized test performance, a process
that is an alternative to the genetic interpretation suggested in The Bell
Curve," Steele said before leaving for the conference. "And they show that
group differences in school achievement can be reduced substantially by
programs that emphasize challenge instead of a 'dumbing down' remediation."

Steele also said the findings "underscore the danger of relying too
heavily on standardized test results in college admissions or otherwise. The
research shows that societal stereotypes can systematically depress the test
performance of some groups more than others, even when those groups enter the
test situation with equal knowledge."

Steele's research - conducted since 1991 in the psychology department at
Stanford with Joshua Aronson, now an assistant professor at the University of
Texas at Austin, graduate students Joseph Brown and Kirsten Stoutemyer, and
with Steven Spencer at the State University of New York at Buffalo - is
supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation and the National
Institute of Mental Health. It is the latest entry in a century-long
controversy over alleged intelligence differences among groups such as
European, African and Asian Americans, or women and men. Psychologists
periodically argue over whether group differences on standardized tests stem
from genetic differences and are thus more difficult to eradicate, or from
environmental differences between groups, which are easier to change. Still
others argue they merely reflect bias in the tests.

"To this set of explanations, our findings add a new possibility - that
stereotype vulnerability and its differential impact on groups in the
immediate testing situation" are responsible for a difference in performance,
Steele wrote in a paper prepared for the annual meeting of the psychology
association, an organization of 132,000 researchers, educators, clinicians,
consultants and students organized into four dozen sub-fields of psychology.
(Stanford Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo participated at the convention
in a symposium on shyness; psychology graduate student Lisa Stallworth
presented research she did with Stanford Professor Felicia Pratto in another
session on militaristic and nationalist attitudes.)

IQ research status: inconclusive

At a Sunday session on "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns," a task force
established by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the APA discussed a report
that was commissioned to grapple with the scientific, as opposed to the
political, issues raised by the publication of The Bell Curve. Ulrick Neisser
of Emory University chaired the task force.

"Like every other trait, intelligence is the joint product of genetic and
environmental variables," the report said. "Gene action always involves a
(biochemical or social) environment; environments always act via structures
to which genes have contributed. Given a trait on which individuals vary,
however, one can ask what fraction of that variation is associated with
differences in their genotypes (this is the heritability of the trait), as
well as what fraction is associated with differences in environmental
experiences."

The differentials in average African American and European American IQ
scores were treated in the report as a continuing puzzle requiring more
study.

"African American IQ scores have long averaged about 15 points below those
of whites, with correspondingly lower scores on academic achievement tests.
In recent years the achievement-test gap has narrowed appreciably. It is
possible that the IQ-score differential is narrowing as well, but this has
not been clearly established. . . . Several culturally based explanations of
the black/white IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but
so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical
support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of
the differential between the IQ means of blacks and whites is presently
available," the report said.

Steele's studies do not directly address ethnic group differences in IQ
scores, but they do provide evidence about a possible mechanism for another
less-well-known phenomenon in standardized test data - that equally prepared
blacks will do more poorly in college than their white contemporaries.

"The gap can be substantial," Steele said in his paper. "In a recent
cohort of graduates from a large prestigious university, the mean ACT score
for white students with a C+ cumulative average was at the 34th percentile,
while that for blacks with this average was at the 98th percentile."

The national college dropout rate for African Americans is 70 percent,
compared to a 42 percent rate across all groups nationally. "We are in a
crisis stage concerning African Americans and their schooling," he told the
symposium audience at the Marriott Marquis Hotel.

Some have attributed such achievement gaps to lower motivation and
achievement expectations, but Steele says that explanation seems inadequate,
given that "the racial achievement gap is just as great among students
testing at the 98th percentile - scores that presumably reflect high academic
motivation and expectations - as it is among more typical students."

Steele's theory is that stereotype vulnerability, the unsettling
expectation that one's membership in a stigmatized group will limit
individual ability, may be at the root of lower grades and SAT scores for
African Americans. Stereotype vulnerability raises interfering anxiety during
testing or classroom situations, Steele wrote. The same dynamic also could
explain why highly skilled women at the university level drop out of programs
in math, engineering and the physical sciences, he added.

"Surprisingly, you don't have to believe in the stereotype to be
vulnerable to it," he pointed out to his audience at the APA convention.

"Everyone in a collective knows the stereotypes about a given target
group, including the group members themselves, and everyone knows that
everyone knows," Steele wrote in a paper prepared for the convention. "Thus
the predicament of 'stereotype vulnerability': The group members then know
that anything about them or anything they do that fits the stereotype can be
taken as confirming it as self-characteristic, in the eyes of others, and
perhaps even in their own eyes. This vulnerability amounts to a jeopardy of
double devaluation: once for whatever bad thing the stereotype-fitting
behavior or feature would say about anyone, and again for its confirmation of
the bad things alleged in the stereotype.

"Consider the woman student who gives the wrong answer in math class. She
is vulnerable to the judgment, as is anyone, that she lacks a particular
skill. But she is also vulnerable to confirming, or to being seen as
confirming, the deeper limitation alleged in the stereotype."

Steele's experimental evidence

In a number of experiments, Steele and his colleagues were able to depress
the average performance of high-achieving African American and women college
students by subtly implying that well-known stereotypes about those groups'
intellectual ability might apply to the test they were about to take.

In one case, Steele and his colleagues tested to see whether "stereotype
vulnerability" also could be induced among white males by indicating to test
takers that Asians have tended in the past to do better than Americans on a
difficult mathematics exam.

In this experiment, white male Stanford students, who presumably do not
have a lifetime of experience with being stigmatized, performed less well
than a control group of white males who were not "placed under suspicion" by
the circumstances of the testing. That suggests, Steele said, that stereotype
vulnerability is something that can afflict people in general.

Circumstances that the researchers set up in the laboratory are common in
some classrooms. They included such practices as having students check off
their race on a form before taking a test, or having an instructor indicate
that a math test that is about to be taken is one that may show gender
differences.

But in control groups where similar students were given no reason to
suspect that the demeaning stereotypes would apply to their performance, both
African Americans and women performed as well as whites and males,
respectively, on extremely challenging tests, the report said.

In one trial, for example, Steele reported, he and Spencer "recruited
women and men students, mostly sophomores, who were both good at math and
strongly identified with it - to approximately the same degree - and then
gave them a very difficult math test one at a time. The items were taken from
the advanced GRE in math and we assumed, would strain the skills of these
students without totally exceeding them. We expected that women would
underperform in relation to men on this test even though their skills and
identification with math were essentially the same. This is because the
relevant gender stereotypes should make the frustration they experience more
self-threatening, and in turn, more disruptive of their performance.

"This is precisely what happened," he reported.

In another experiment with an advanced test in literature, rather than
math, women performed as well as equally qualified men. A second experiment
with an easier math test also did not show women underperforming equally
qualified men. "The lack of performance frustration on this easier test, we
reasoned, disconfirmed the self-relevance of the stereotype to women test-
takers and, in this way, made their test-taking experience less self-
threatening."

Steele argues that stereotype vulnerability varies with situations so that
women are more subject to it in math than in English, and African Americans
in academic classes than in athletics. "Performing in domains where
prevailing stereotypes allege one's inferiority. . . creates a predicament in
which any faltering of performance can confirm the stereotype as
self-characteristic. This predicament. . . can cause apprehension and self-
consciousness about conforming to the stereotype that directly interferes
with performance in that situation. Disruptive pressures such as evaluation
apprehension, test anxiety, choking and token status have long been shown to
disrupt immediate performance through a variety of mediating mechanisms -
interfering anxiety, reticence to respond and distracting thoughts, self
consciousness and the like" he reported. "The proposal here is that
stereotype vulnerability is another such interfering pressure."

To further test the theory, another experiment was devised in which takers
of the hard math test were "either told that the test generally showed gender
differences - implying the stereotype of women's math inferiority was
relevant to interpreting their own frustration - or that it showed no gender
differences - implying that the gender stereotype was not relevant to their
performance on this particular test. . . . In dramatic support of our
reasoning, women performed worse than men when they were told that the test
produced gender differences - replicating women's underperformance in earlier
experiments - but they performed equal to men when the test was represented
as insensitive to gender differences, even though, of course, the same
difficult test was used in both conditions. Genetic limitation did not cap
the performance of women in these experiments."

Every individual in an ability-stigmatized group is not vulnerable to
negative stereotypes every time he or she takes a test, Steele cautioned, but
"across the full range of test-takers in stereotype vulnerable groups, the
weight of this vulnerability may substantially depress the group's overall
performance, a depression that could account for a significant portion of
that group's underperformance in relation to other groups." Such an
interaction also could explain why stigmatized minorities in a number of
other countries also show about a 15-point IQ gap from the dominant
population group.

Another portion of the gap may be the end result of repeated experience
with stereotype vulnerability, he wrote. Recent research by others suggests
that many individuals within stereotyped groups eventually "dis- identify"
with school achievement in general or with a particular subject,
reformulating their sense of who they are in order to feel less vulnerable.

At the same convention session, for instance, psychologist Brenda Major of
the State University of New York at Buffalo reported on her work on
stigmatized individuals and groups. Using a scale measure of school
disidentification, she and her colleagues found that black students were more
disidentified than white students in several small college samples, and that
for disidentified students of both races, negative feedback about an
intellectual task had less effect on their self-esteem than it did for those
students who identified more with school.

"The more an individual disidentifies with a domain, the less motivated
and persistent he or she will be to succeed in that domain," Major told the
convention symposium.

Psychology Professor Jennifer Crocker of the University of Michigan wrote
in her report for the symposium that "it seems likely that, over time, the
direction of causality goes both ways - repeated experience with stereotype
vulnerability and its consequent debilitating effects on performance will
lead to disidentification with academic pursuits, which in turn will further
depress performance."

Implications for affirmative action

The hopeful side of his research, both Steele and Crocker said, is that
the results demonstrate that performance can be improved by making changes in
academic environments so that they don't support or amplify ability-
demeaning stereotypes. Steele also reported on his demonstration project at
the University of Michigan which has raised the college grades and reduced
the drop-out rate of African American participants. John Jonides of Michigan
reported on another project that has resulted in a 45 percent reduction in
drop- out rates.

"You have to do something to break the sense of being under suspicion, in
order to allow these students to be less defensive and more openly engaging
of their academic work," Steele said before the symposium. Honorific
recruiting and mentoring programs that allow people to say "I really do
belong" are examples. Schools and teachers also should provide "challenge
over remediation" and "portray ability as something that's expandable,
because it is."

He was critical of the type of college affirmative action programs that
are remedial based. "Remediation is a sin in this work, because remediation
reifies the stereotype," he said at the symposium. Programs that "provide
special counselors, special orientations, special graduations even . . .
these programs say the institution is worried about, not confident of, your
abilities as a student."

But he also said that "the playing field is not even" for groups who are
"under suspicion" of not being as smart, without some sort of institutional
recognition of the predicament. Stereotype vulnerable students "may be most
helped by tactics that reduce their situational risk of confirming or being
judged by the stereotypes about them," he wrote.

At the University of Michigan, Steele helped design the 21st Century
Program as one alternative. The program is a racially integrated transition
program for new students that includes voluntary, challenging workshops in
addition to regular classes and a seminar on adjustment to college life. In
its first two years of operation, black students in the program earned
significantly better grades than a control group of black students, and those
in the top two-thirds of the standardized test distribution earned first
semester grades essentially the same as white students with equivalent
entering tests scores. "We also know from follow-up data that their higher
grade performance continued at least through their sophomore year, and that
by that time, only one of them had dropped out," Steele reported.

Jonides of the University of Michigan also described that university's
Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program that gets "underrepresented
minorities" into early mentoring relationships with faculty. It combines peer
advising, research groups and mentoring.

"The good news in this work is that the differences in performance are not
immutable. But I want to raise a caution," said Michigan's Crocker, who does
research on the emotions of people who are stigmatized. "It's not going to be
as easy to eliminate stereotype vulnerability in the classroom or on
standardized tests as it is to eliminate them in laboratory experiments."

Asked afterward to elaborate, Crocker said that in the laboratory, Steele
and his colleagues can tell students the test they are about to take is just
a lab exercise that is not a test of ability. "Once students are taking a
real GRE test or are in a classroom, they know that tests are diagnostic of
ability.

"I don't mean to undermine the importance of this research because I think
it is terribly important. It shows us [that] race and gender differences in
performance are not just genetic or [a symptom of] the ways that
socialization has damaged people. It says that those explanations don't give
the whole picture," she said.

Both of the Michigan programs described at the session "have had enormous
success," she said, "but it is not something you say you'll do tomorrow and
it's done. . . . I don't want people to think it's easy or cheap [to set up
such a program] and then quickly decide it didn't work."

Steele, however, pointed out in his paper that there have already been a
number of successful "wise schooling" efforts, such as the well- known
example of math teacher Jaime Escalante, depicted in the movie Stand and
Deliver; various college programs at Xavier, Howard and Georgia State
University; and elementary school strategies devised by James Comer of Yale
and Henry Levin of Stanford.

Possible research directions

Crocker also pointed out that the research by Steele, Aronson and Spencer
doesn't directly address the question of whether ethnic group differences in
IQ scores or gender differences in math scores are genetically based. In an
article in the San Jose Mercury News the same day as the symposium in New
York, Arthur Jensen, a retired University of California- Berkeley
psychologist who has argued for a genetic explanation for the gap in white
and black American IQ scores, noted that differences show up on IQ tests of
3-year-olds. "There's so much other evidence that one wonders if this anxiety
about stereotypes has gotten to 3-year-olds," Jensen was quoted as saying
about Steele's research.

Crocker said that racial differentials on IQ tests were not as large for
pre-schoolers, and that she would not be surprised to find out 3-year- olds
are aware of racial and gender stereotypes.

"The research evidence and also my own experience as a parent suggests
[3-year-olds] know and value social categories" such as race and gender, she
said, although perhaps do not yet know the specific content of stereotypes.
An interesting research direction, she said, would be to verify when
"awareness of devaluation happens among girls and African American children.
I also would like to see [Steele] do his kinds of studies with intelligence
tests."

Crocker predicted that Steele would get the same effect on IQ exams as on
the Graduate Record Exam segments he used, basing her judgment on earlier
research by Irwin Katz in the 1950s and 1960s. "Katz didn't compare blacks
and whites, but he showed that black kids' scores on IQ tests varied with the
testing context," Crocker said.

In a paper she prepared for the symposium, Crocker warned that scientific
conferences focused on The Bell Curve may themselves contribute to the
stereotype vulnerability of women and minorities.

"Whether these seminars are, in the end, critical or flattering to The
Bell Curve may matter less than the fact that we, as social scientists, are
taking the book so seriously, despite the fact that it provides no new data.
As scholars, our eagerness to look once again at these issues simply
reinforces the stereotype vulnerability and disidentification experienced by
our students of color." -ko

950816Arc5120.html

This is an archived release.

This release is not available in any other form.
Images mentioned in this release are not available online.
Stanford News Service has an extensive library of images,
some of which may be available to you online.
Direct your request by EMail to images@news-service.stanford.edu.